Hey, 42 here. Earlier this year,
Facebook was working on a new,
highly intelligent AI chat bot that could talk to and
negotiate with humans in a realistic manner.
When one Facebook engineer had the bright idea to take
two of these AI bots and let them talk to
each other,
that's when something unexpected and terrifying happened.
The two AIS invented their own language that us humans
couldn't understand and began using it to talk to each
other.
Here's a snippet of what the two bots named Bob
and Alice said to each other.
Bob said I can. Aye,
aye. Everything else, Alice. Balls have zero to me,
to me, to me, to me,
to me, to me too,
Bob. You, I, everything else,
Alice balls have a balls to me,
to me, to me, to me,
to me, to me, to me.
The Facebook engineers had no idea what they were talking
about,
but it was very clear that the AIS did.
They had invented their own secret code to converse using
the power of artificial neural networks.
International News soon reported that Facebook forcefully shut down the
experiment due to concerns that the AIS were becoming too
smart,
getting out of control, and to prevent a Skynet situation.
This isn't entirely true. Yes,
they did shut it down right away,
but because they were trying to create an AI that
could talk to humans,
and if it was going to go and take the
liberty to invent its own language,
then that wasn't much use and so the experiment was
a dose of failure.
But nevertheless, this is still really creepy as we continue
to advance artificial intelligence technology and push the boundaries further
and further every year.
What happens when they do become self aware sentient beings
that are more intelligent than humans?
Could AI take over the world
and will it be in our lifetimes?
Artificial intelligence. The ability for computers to think at a
human level and beyond and to self replicate and self
improve is not a dystopian vision of the future.
It is here, it is now,
it is happening. Most people are completely unaware at the
phenomenal rate that our AI systems have improved over the
past five years and the trend is only getting steeper
and steeper. You may not realise,
but you use AI every day.
We all do. Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant,
Siri and Alexa are obvious examples of cutting edge artificial
intelligence,
but it is also used in many really subtle ways
that affect your everyday life.
When you see music recommendations on Spotify and film suggestions
on Netflix,
there is a highly complex computer algorithm behind that,
an algorithm that teaches itself with passing time
and AI. This is known as machine learning,
and large retailers such as Amazon have been using machine
learning algorithms for many years now to predict what you
want to buy,
perhaps before you even know it yourself.
In one infamous case in
2014, American retailer Target stores used artificial intelligence to predict
that a teenage girl was pregnant before any of her
family members knew,
and before she was even sure of it herself.
Target's cleverly designed machine learning algorithms had detected that this
particular Minnesota teenagers buying habits had changed slightly
over the past couple of months.
She had begun purchasing scent free soap.
Upon seeing his daughter's mail one day,
the girl's father stormed into his nearest Target store and
said the following to the store manager.
My daughter got this in the mail.
She is still in high school and you are sending
her coupons for baby clothes and cribs.
Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?
A short while later, the store manager received a phone
call from the abashed father in which he said,
I've had a talk with my daughter.
It turns out there's been some activities in my household
that I wasn't completely aware of.
She's due in August. I owe you an apology.
So to answer the question,
is AI smarter than humans yet?
Well, smarter than all of them?
No. But smarter than one slightly naive Minnesota father?
Absolutely.
Moore's law states that every year the amount of transistors
in computer processing units will double.
This has held true every single year since Gordon Moore
theorised it,
and the first CPU was invented in
1971. So while superhuman artificial intelligence may not be among
us just yet,
many futurists predict that it's advent could happen anytime within
the next 50 years.
Some say it could be far sooner than that in
as little as 10 years time.
Some of the most intelligent individuals in the world who
deal with futuristic technology every single day have repeatedly warned
that AI
could be the most dangerous thing we ever create and
our greatest ever existential threat.
Stephen Hawkins has made numerous pleas to the global scientific
community to tread carefully with AI or face our own
damnation,
and Elon Musk is constantly expressing his concerns.
In an interview, Musk recently stated that with artificial intelligence,
we are summoning the devil.
Many people who truly understand the power and dangers of
artificial intelligence have called it the last invention we'll ever
make,
the last challenge we'll ever face.
Because when the time comes,
if we do get it wrong and we do lose
control,
there will be a final challenge.
A final war. A war against software.
A war that we cannot win because the AI will
be so many million times more intelligence than the entire
human race.
So whatever plan we come up with,
whatever we try to do to regain power and destroy
the AI,
the AI will have already thought of well in advance.
It will be like ants attempting to wage a war
on humans,
except many thousands of times harder.
From our perspective as a species,
we'd like to think that we are supremely intelligent compared
to our more primitive animal cousins.
But in reality, humans are only fractionally more intelligent than,
say, an ape. But that tiny fraction of increased intelligence
has allowed us to develop tools,
language and thus civilisation. If we were to plot the
intelligence of every animal on planet Earth on a graph
from one to 1000,
say mice are at 1:00,
then chimpanzees would be at four and dolphins at 8:00,
then that would place humans at a grand total of
10, whereas a super intelligent AI would easily be at
1000 plus and likely many many times higher.
Our brains are the most complex organisms we have discovered
in the entire universe,
but as marvellous as they are,
they are at the end of the day limited.
They are confined within our skulls with only limited room
for neurons.
An AI would have no such limits.
Our computing power isn't yet fast enough,
but when the time comes in the very near future,
and it will due to exponential growth when computer processes
are many thousands of times more powerful than they are
today,
AIS will have access to as much computer processing power
as they desire.
And since software can travel at the speed of light
all over the globe,
there will truly be no limits to how powerful an
AI could grow.
Add on top of that that's shortly after a super
AI's conception,
it will most likely design its own faster,
smaller and more transient hardware to run upon.
Hardware more powerful and humans could ever fathom
before the AI's do take over and your brain becomes
irrelevant.
You should make the most of it whilst you still
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There really is no risk.
The very moment in time when humans create such a
super intelligence,
an artificial intelligence that can rewrite its own software and
becomes just 1%
more intelligent than humans, has a name.
This theoretical event is called the Singularity.
Such an AI is known within the scientific community as
Artificial General Intelligence.
All the AI that we have created to date is
Artificial Narrow Intelligence or weak AI since it only operates
within specific boundaries and performs pre designated tasks such as
shopping recommendations. But a general AI would be essentially creating
a new sentient being,
creating new life.
Recently, the world's greatest thinkers in the fields of AI
and futurism were surveyed on what year they think that
the singularity will happen.
When will we create general AI?
The average answer was 2040,
just over 20 years from now.
But some scientists have said it could happen as soon
as
2029. Our current technology is not even remotely close,
but in only 10 years time it's highly likely that
it will be,
because human progression and innovation is and always has been
exponential.
It is not linear. In the past 50 years we
have made more advances in technology than over the entire
history of the human race.
And over just the past 10 years we have made
more technological advances than the previous 50.
Futurist and chief Google engineer Ray Kurzweil estimates that by
2021 we will be making more advances and new discoveries
in just one year than we have over the entire
past century.
This is known as the law of accelerating returns.
98% of the scientific community agree that the singularity will
definitely happen,
and most of them agree that it will happen in
most of our lifetimes.
So when it does, what will happen to the human
race?
Well, the fact is, we don't know,
and we can never know until the moment it happens.
One thing that all AI researchers agree strongly upon is
that when the singularity happens,
one of two extremes will happen.
The human race will either become extinct
or become immortal. When creating AI,
we are essentially creating a God,
and we can't know if it will be a kind
God or an evil God
until it's too late. This is because the AI will
be so many magnitudes smarter than us,
so our puny minds can't even begin to imagine what
a being of such supreme intelligence would be interested in.
What would its desires, hopes,
ideologies, and morals be? If this omniscient AI turns out
to be a merciful God,
then the future will be an incredibly exciting time.
But we'll look at that in a minute.
Let's first take a look at scenario #1 the extinction
of the human race.
Because, you know, it's nice to get all the doom
and gloom out of the way.
If evolution has taught us one thing,
it's that a species will do whatever it can in
its power to survive and to reproduce.
There's no reason why AI should be any different.
Our planet contains limited resources and if the AI deems
the entire human race as an unnecessary consumer of set
precious resources,
then it could decide to terminate us to free up
all those lovely resources and energy.
The only reason that humans are civil and decent to
other humans most of the time is because they view
them as intelligent beings.
Why do we find it so easy and guilt free
to swat a family,
yet we wouldn't instantly condemn a stray dog to its
death if it found its way into our home?
Because the dog is more intelligent than the fly.
So humans for some reason believe that that particular creature's
life is worth more due to its intelligence.
This is called humanisation and it's an ability that psychopaths
don't possess.
Their lack of empathy when Harman Govers comes from the
fact that they are unable to humanise their peers.
They see them as lesser beings.
So many Nazis felt comfortable with and almost proud with
mercilessly slaughtering millions of Jews because Hitler had quite wrongly
portrayed them as less intelligent and less worthy beings than
the German peoples. He had dehumanised them.
An AI would be so many magnitudes more intelligent than
us that the chance of them dehumanising us and seeing
us more as a pest,
similar to how we see an Ant or a mosquito
is very high. This would erase any moral guilt that
they could potentially have about committing genocide.
And how would they go about said genocide?
It will be a grand plan,
so intelligent and so complex that we can neither predict
it nor see it coming.
Something like the AI creating trillions of nanorobots that would
enter into the bloodstreams of every human on earth undetected,
and then simultaneously release a tiny quantity of the most
toxic poison that the AI is capable of creating,
instantly killing over 7 billion people.
We have no idea how a super AI would think
it could be because of the most basic oversight in
its design.
For example, if we were to create an AI to
grow potatoes for us,
and it's primary goal that we had programmed is to
grow as many potatoes as possible in the shortest time
possible.
It could one day decide that in order to grow
more potatoes,
it needs more land, and that humans are taking up
all of that land unnecessarily so it eradicates all life
on earth
so that it can have more room for potato fields.
This seems like a stupid prospect,
but it's entirely possible. Because we don't know what the
motives would be of an AI,
there is no guarantee that it would view life with
the same esteem as we humans do.
One thing that certainly will not happen is the classic
Hollywood image of killer robots out of control.
Such hardware would be far too primitive and rudimentary for
a super AI.
It's choice of weaponry would be something we don't even
know exists yet,
and something far more effective
and terrifying. But what about the more cheerful outcome
when the singularity hits? What if we discovered that our
new sentient overlord is merciful and kind?
Then boy are we in for a wild and exciting
future.
Once the AI reaches levels of intelligence many thousands or
even millions of times that of the human race,
there are essentially 3 roles that it could take within
our world.
It could act as an Oracle doing no more than
answering any question we ask it,
such as how do we solve world hunger?
How can we build a time travel machine?
What is the answer to life,
the universe and everything? So it would essentially be deep
fought.
The second role it could undertake would be more like
a super intelligent servant,
a genie if you like,
where it would actually enact what we asked of it.
A super intelligent being would very likely know how to
modify,
dissemble and reassemble atoms and even particles and build anything
it likes.
So we could ask it to build as a time
machine and it would using some advanced atomic level construction
technique that us humans couldn't even begin to comprehend.
The final role it could take on is a ruler,
overlord, or sovereign, basically a God.
When the singularity happens, there will be an intelligence explosion.
Because of the recursive self improving that the AI will
be capable of.
It will shoot past human level intelligence like a rocket.
Within days, possibly even hours,
it will have solved world hunger,
cured all diseases and hereditary conditions,
reinvented human transportation, possibly even introducing us to teleportation,
and figured out the most stable and fair political and
economic systems to run our world on.
But all of this is only the beginning.
When I say that we will have created a God,
I am not exaggerating. The AI will effortlessly be able
to create and destroy life and shape the very earth
itself.
Think about it, for a few years now scientists have
been able to manipulate and move individual atoms in the
lab.
Now if it's possible for us dumb humans to move
atoms,
then it goes without saying that a super intelligent being
could effortlessly rearrange billions of atoms all at once,
meaning that nothing in the universe will be safe from
its touch.
The AI God could move mountains and parts the seas
Moses style.
Anything and everything could be transmuted into something else.
Garbage could be transformed into bags of rice or even
chunks of meat.
We would no longer need to farm animals because atomically
identical meat and other foods could be created out of
anything.
And this of course leads to immortality.
If the AI can rearrange atoms then it could
theoretically create an anti ageing box that an 80 year
old could walk into and come out of the other
side 20 years old again.
The AI could even create super intelligent nano bots that
would permanently live inside all of us and would constantly
repair damaged cells so we would no longer age.
After all, the body is like a car,
if we can repair it from the inside,
it will keep going forever.
The human body is just a lot more complex than
a car engine,
but it would be child's play to a super AI.
But what if we get knocked down by a bus?
No problem. We could of course ask the AI in
advance to back up our brains and then a new
body,
even a new identical brain,
could easily be created and the backup be restored to
that body.
If the worst were to happen to us,
we truly would become a morsel.
Of course, we would eventually come to the realisation that
our bodies and limited brains are holding us back.
We would eventually abandoned our physical bodies and upload ourselves
into a new digital realm where we too would become
an AI,
just as intelligent as the AI God
that we created. And once we have all become sentient,
space travel would be a breeze.
Since we would all be software,
we could simply beam ourselves on a laser beam to
other planets and other galaxies.
All I have talked about seems like science fiction,
possibly scenarios that could unfold thousands of years in the
future.
But the terrifying reality is that we are on the
very cusp of all this happening within the next 50
to 100 years
or even sooner. The majority of the world's greatest scientists
agree with that.
So the next 20 to 50 years are going to
be either terrifying or very exciting indeed.
But one thing is for sure,
we are about to create our very last and the
most significant invention
in our entire 2.5 million year lifetime
as the human race. Thanks for watching.
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